


Lucifer in Starlight

by ssa_archivist



Category: Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-04-21
Updated: 2002-04-21
Packaged: 2017-11-01 11:05:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/355967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssa_archivist/pseuds/ssa_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>.and at the stars,<br/>Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank .</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lucifer in Starlight

## Lucifer in Starlight

by Brighid

<http://www.debchan.com/livia/brighid/brighid.htm>

* * *

Disclaimer: Vignette is mine, the characters are DC's and the title is George Meredith's - poem at the end. 

Lucifer in Starlight 

By Brighid 

The city lights obscure the stars, so instead he lies on the chaise-lounge of the penthouse deck and traces the constellations in his memory. Heroes and monsters, pitted against one another since time immemorial, their stories written in the stars, written in stone. Not one that he can remember has anything to do with redemption. 

This night is a night between, a moment poised between possibilities. He knows these moments well. 

He takes a long, slow sip of Laphroaig, thirty years in the making, not that much younger than he is, really; he feels its heat down to his gut. It is the only thing that warms him. He thinks of stars and fates and wonders, not for the first time, if the fault lies in them or in himself. Daddy dead three years, the presidency all but bought and paid for, and he stands here getting slightly drunk, slightly maudlin, rewriting history in his head. Wondering who he'd be now, what he'd be if he'd made a different choice at some critical point - a truth instead of a half-truth, a hand taken, a confidence given. Small things that could mean the difference between a lonely rooftop and ... and... 

Sometimes, he chooses the cornfield. Not the first time, not the searing heat and thunderous rage of worlds crashing, but a dark night and a boy tied up on a makeshift cross: scarecrow, hanging god, a myth waiting to be born. What if he'd pulled him down slowly, so the pendant didn't drop, so the boy didn't bolt into the darkness? What if he'd chafed his wrists and kissed that gasping mouth, tasted blood and salt and played some other part than Judas? 

Sometimes he chooses the hospital corridor. He touches the bruises, feels the flinch, pulls the shirt aside and kisses the wounds until world and time stops, the walls melt and there is only the two of them, with broken flesh and broken hearts between them. In this might-have-been, somewhere between the first kiss and the last he finds the secret place, the hollow in the throat, the dip down the centre of the breast, the dent where thigh meets hip, breathes into it and all the secrets just come undone, fall apart, until there is nothing left between them at all. 

Sometimes, so many times, it is the first time that was the last time: a very early morning in a barn loft, with an eighteen-year old man and a twenty-four-year old boy and it's all heat and hurt and kisses that land like blows. Clark, naked and writhing under him, blood on his lips that was not Clark's own but might as well have been, telling Lex to choose, to choose wisely, to be himself, to be anything he had to be but to be himself. 

In the aftermath they dressed in silence, and Clark didn't bother to wipe the blood away, wearing it because he couldn't bleed himself. "I'm not human," Clark had said quietly, almost desperately. 

Hurt and angry yet, he'd seen it only as too little, too late. "Neither am I," he'd replied and then there was a stairwell, a farmyard, a world between them. 

It does not escape him that these moments between, these pivotal points, would in any other man revolve around the death of his mother, the deceit of his father; it does not escape him that all his might-have-beens that mean anything at all are tied up in Clark Kent. 

He blinks at the wavering stars and it's whiskey burn in his throat, not tears, not tears. 

Today, Superman destroyed a secret test facility, one no one should have known about. And then he'd flown by the offices of the independent candidate in the current election, presumably to offer words of advice, but really to warn him, to remind him that there was check and there was mate and the game would never been over. 

He never should have taught Clark chess. 

Today, Superman stood stone-faced before him, the alien Eagle Scout, called him on the carpet, called him "Luthor" in a tone he must have learned from Jonathan Kent ... but his eyes, his eyes were like Clark on the cross, in the hospital, in the barn, reaching into Luthor and still trying to see Lex. 

Lex sprawls out, drinks the last of the glass, the last of the bottle, and wonders idly if this is it then, predestination, that he must always play the monster to Clark Kent's hero. Or is it simply some colossal fuck-up of his own making that has pitted him against what was once (is still, and it's the whiskey, god, just the whiskey in his throat) his heart's desire? And would knowing the answer make any difference at all? 

There is a rush of sound, a familiarly soft, catlike tread and then a hand taking the glass from his. He looks up. The night mutes the gaudy red and blue, makes it almost bearable. "I think you've had enough, don't you?" and the voice is soft, so soft. Clark's voice, despite the uniform. The visits have grown rarer over the years, but never stopped. Never quite. 

"You know us Luthors," he says, tilting his head, smiling. "No such thing as enough." 

"You may well be President of the United States next week," Clark says at last. "Surely that's enough?" He sits at Lex's feet, watches him, eyes glittering in the reflected city gleam. 

"No such thing as enough," Lex says again, because he has to believe it. He sits up, moves across the deck, away from Clark's searching eyes, the quiet knowing that fills up the space between them. "Why are you here?" 

Clark sits quietly, and then smiles. Not the sun-bright beam that had so captivated Lex over twenty years ago; time and experience have edged it, thinned it. "I missed you," he says at last, and it makes Lex's knees go weak. "I miss what you might have been." What we might have been lingers in the air, unspoken. 

"It's not that easy," Lex says, and he knows it's an admission, but _fuck_ , over twenty years and he's never unmasked Clark, so perhaps it's not that much of an admission. "It was never that easy. It's not always a choice, Clark. Sometimes, sometimes it's destiny. Fate. Our greatest love, our greatest hate." 

Clark stands up, snorts inelegantly. "Now I know you've had too much. You're misquoting Shakespeare and _rhyming_. Badly." And then he's there, so close Lex can smell ozone and wind and the faint, elusive tang of earth, of apples. "It's always a choice, Lex. We get pushed sometimes, nudged, but we always choose. We reach points in our lives and we choose," and he's reaching out, hand cupping the back of Lex's skull, mouth hard and wet and so damnably _human_ over Lex's. Memory guides Lex's hands, leads them up strong, lean sides, along the well-loved curve of jaw and ears, into thick, dark hair. This, this makes him far drunker than Laphroaig, than power, than empires - the conquest of Clark Kent's mouth, the kingdom of his heart. 

Funny how he'd almost forgotten that. 

At last, gasping, he pulls back, touches the dark gleam of blood of Clark's mouth, probes the split on his own lip with his tongue. He tilts his head back, and the stars are wheeling overhead, dizzy and tumultuous and it's a night between, a moment poised between possibilities. Cassandra and her signposts. Lionel and his roads to Rome. Clark and his fucking willingness to believe the best, even of the worst. God or monster? 

He pulls away, closes his eyes, walks backwards to the edge of the deck. Opens them one last time, to see Clark starting to frown. He grins at the stupid spit curl on Clark's forehead. That would have to go. Blows Clark a kiss, and then drops back into nothing. 

There is a moment of freefall, a moment recaptured, the shock of wind almost as chill as the water that had once almost been the end of him. And then Clark's arms around him, and Clark's mouth on his, and he's flying again, he's flying and he's unafraid. 

"It won't be easy," Clark says later, much later, naked and eating an apple in a bed in a medieval castle built, most incongruously, in Kansas. Lex steals a bite of the apple, leans in and licks the juice from the other man's mouth. 

"Easier with you than without you," Lex says at last, watching Clark's eyes darken and dilate. "I don't want easy, I just want ... you." And it's true; in this moment it is the only truth that matters. 

He shifts, lays down against the pillows, pulls Clark against his chest. Slides into sleep. 

Dreams of stars. 

)0( 

A new beginning... 

Lucifer in Starlight 

-George Meredith 

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.   
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend  
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,  
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.  
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.  
And now upon his western wing he leaned,  
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,  
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.  
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars  
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,  
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,  
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.  
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,  
The army of unalterable law.   



End file.
